Chapter 14 - Road to Cairo

Weary though I was of all the East, nevertheless, Cairo represented civilization. I think I have never felt a greater wave of satisfaction than at the moment when, completing the third and longest stage of our flight from Ispahan, we climbed down upon the sands of Egypt.

Dr. Petrie was there to meet us; and the greeting between himself and Sir Denis, while it had all the restraint which characterizes our peculiar race, was nevertheless so intimate and affectionate that I turned away and helped Ramin down the ladder.

When the chief, last to alight, joined his old friend, I felt that Ramin and I had no further part in the affair.

It should have been a happy reunion, but a cloud lay over it—a cloud which I, personally, was helpless to dispel.

Dr. Petrie, no whit changed since last I had seen him, broke away from Sir Denis and the chief and hugged Ramin and myself in both arms. The best of men are not wholly unselfish; and part of Petrie’s present happiness was explainable by something which I had overheard as he had grasped Nayland Smith’s hand:

“Thank God, old man! Kara is home in England. . . .”

Mrs. Petrie, the most beautiful woman I have ever met, was staying with Petrie’s people in Surrey, where the doctor shortly anticipated joining her.

I was sincerely glad. For the gaunt shadow of Fu Manchu again had crept over us, and the lovely wife whom Petrie had snatched from that evil genius was in safe keeping beyond the reach of the menace which stretched over us even here.

Nevertheless, this was a momentary hiatus, if no more than momentary. Ramin extended his arms, raised his head, and breathed in the desert air as one inhaling a heavenly perfume.

“Shan,” he said, “I don’t feel a bit safe, yet. But at least we are in Egypt, our Egypt!”

Those words “our Egypt” quickened my pulse. It was in Egypt that I had met him, and in Egypt that I had learned to love him. But above and beyond even this they held a deeper significance. There is something about Egypt which seems to enter the blood of some of us, and to make that old, secret land a sort of super-motherland. I lack the power properly to express what I mean, but over and over again I have found this odd sort of cycle operating—suggesting some mystic affinity with the “gift of the Nile,” which, once recognized, can never be shaken off.

“Our Egypt!” Yes, I appreciated what he meant. . . .

Dr. Petrie had his car waiting, and presently we set out for Cairo. Our pilot, Humphreys, had official routine duties to perform, but arrangements were made for his joining us later.

The chief, with Nayland Smith and Ramin, packed themselves in behind, and I sat beside Dr. Petrie in front. Having cleared the outskirts of Heliopolis and got out onto the road to Cairo: “This last job of yours, Greville,” said Petrie, “in Khorassan, has had its echoes even here.”

“Good heavens! You don’t tell me!”

“I assure you it is so. I hadn’t the faintest idea, until Smith’s first message reached me, that this extraordinary outburst of fanaticism which is stirring up the Moslem population (and has its particular centre at El Azhar) had anything to do with old Barton. Now I know.”

He paused, steering a careful course through those immemorable thoroughfares where East and West mingle. Our pilot had just tricked sunset, and we drove on amid the swift, violet, ever changing dusk; dodging familiar native groups; a donkey-rider now and then—with villas shrinking right and left into the shadows, and dusty palms beginning to assume an appearance of silhouettes against that sky which is the roof of Egypt.

“It may have reached me earlier than it reached the authorities,” Dr. Petrie went on; “I have many native patients. But that the Veiled Prophet is reborn is common news throughout the native quarter!”

“This is damned serious!” said I.

Petrie swept left to avoid a party of three aged Egyptians trudging along the road to Cairo as though automobiles had not been invented.

“When I realized what lay behind it,” Petrie added, “I could only find one redeeming feature—that my wife, thank God! was in England. The centre of the trouble is farther east, but there’s a big reaction here.”

“The centre of the trouble,” rapped Nayland Smith, evidently having overheard some part of our conversation, “is here, in your car, Petrie!”

“What!”

The doctor’s sudden grip on the wheel jerked us from the right to the centre of the road, until he steadied himself; then:

“I don’t know what you mean, Smith,” he added.

“He means the big suitcase which I have with me!” the chief shouted. “It’s under my feet now!”

We were traversing a dark patch at the moment with a crossways ahead of us and a native café on the left. Petrie, a careful driver, had been trying for some time to pass a cart laden with fodder which jogged along obstinately in the middle of the road. Suddenly it was pulled in, and the doctor shot past.

Even as Sir Lionel spoke, and before Petrie could hope to avert the catastrophe, out from the nearer side of this café, supported by two companions, a man (apparently drunk or full of hashish) came lurching. I had a hazy impression that the two supporters had sprung back; then, although Petrie swerved violently and applied brakes, a sickening thud told me that the bumpers had struck him. . . .

A crowd twenty or thirty strong gathered in a twinkling. They were, I noted, exclusively native. Petrie was out first—I behind him—bending over the victim of the accident. Nayland Smith came next, and then Ramin.

Voices were raised in high excitement. Men were gesticulating and shaking clenched fists at us.

“Carry him in,” said Petrie quietly. “I want to look at him. But I think this man is dead. . . .”

On a wooden seat in the café we laid the victim, an elderly Egyptian, very raggedly dressed, who might have been a mendicant. A shouting mob blocked the doorway and swarmed about us. Their attitude was unpleasant.

Nayland Smith grabbed my arm.

“Give ’em hell in their own language!” he directed. “You’re a past master of the lingo.”

I turned, hands upraised, and practically exhausted my knowledge of Arab invective. I was so far successful as to produce a lull of stupefaction during which the doctor made a brief examination.

Ramin throughout had kept close beside me; Nayland Smith stood near the feet of the victim—his face an unreadable mask, but his piercing gray eyes questioning Petrie. And at last:

“Where’s Barton?” said Petrie astonishingly, standing upright and looking about him—from Ramin to myself and from me to Nayland Smith.

“Never mind Barton,” said the latter. “Is the man dead?”

“Dead?” Petrie echoed. “He’s been dead for at least three hours! He’s rigid . . . Where’s Barton?”